The Guaymas Fault is often grouped together with the three transform faults to its north as the Guaymas Transform Fault System. These faults are, from north to south, the Ballenas, Partida, San Lorenzo, and Guaymas. This system of fault extends some 325 km, linking the Delfin Basin in the north with the Guaymas Basin in the south.

1.
Sonora
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Sonora, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Sonora, is one of 31 states that, with Mexico City, comprise the 32 federal entities of Mexico. It is divided into 72 municipalities, the city is Hermosillo. Sonora is located in Northwest Mexico, bordered by the states of Chihuahua to the east, Baja California to the northwest and Sinaloa to the south. To the north, it shares the U. S. –Mexico border with the states of Arizona and New Mexico, and on the west has a significant share of the coastline of the Gulf of California. Sonoras natural geography is divided into three parts, the Sierra Madre Occidental in the east of the state, plains and rolling hills in the center, and the coast on the Gulf of California. It is primarily arid or semiarid deserts and grasslands, with only the highest elevations having sufficient rainfall to support other types of vegetation, Sonora is home to eight indigenous peoples, including the Mayo, the Yaqui, and Seri. It has been important for its agriculture, livestock, and mining since the colonial period. With the Gadsden Purchase, Sonora lost more than a quarter of its territory, from the 20th century to the present, industry, tourism, and agribusiness have dominated the economy, attracting migration from other parts of Mexico. Several theories exist as to the origin of the name Sonora and they encountered the Opata, who could not pronounce Señora, instead saying Senora or Sonora. A third theory, written by Father Cristóbal de Cañas in 1730, states that the name comes from the word for a water well, sonot. The first record of the name Sonora comes from explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, Francisco de Ibarra also traveled through the area in 1567 and referred to the Valles de Señora. Evidence of human existence in the dates back over 10,000 years. The first humans were hunter gatherers who used tools made from stones, seashells. During much of the period, the environmental conditions were less severe than they are today, with similar. The oldest Clovis culture site in North America is believed to be El Fin del Mundo in northwestern Sonora and it was discovered during a 2007 survey. It features occupation dating around 13,390 calibrated years BP, in 2011, remains of Gomphothere were found, the evidence suggests that humans did in fact kill two of them here. Agriculture first appeared around 400 BCE and 200 CE in the river valleys, the lowland central coast, however, seems never truly to have adopted agriculture. Because Sonora and much of the northwest does not share many of the traits of that area

2.
Mexico
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Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a federal republic in the southern half of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States, to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean, to the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea, and to the east by the Gulf of Mexico. Covering almost two million square kilometers, Mexico is the sixth largest country in the Americas by total area, Mexico is a federation comprising 31 states and a federal district that is also its capital and most populous city. Other metropolises include Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, Toluca, Tijuana, pre-Columbian Mexico was home to many advanced Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Olmec, Toltec, Teotihuacan, Zapotec, Maya and Aztec before first contact with Europeans. In 1521, the Spanish Empire conquered and colonized the territory from its base in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, Three centuries later, this territory became Mexico following recognition in 1821 after the colonys Mexican War of Independence. The tumultuous post-independence period was characterized by instability and many political changes. The Mexican–American War led to the cession of the extensive northern borderlands, one-third of its territory. The Pastry War, the Franco-Mexican War, a civil war, the dictatorship was overthrown in the Mexican Revolution of 1910, which culminated with the promulgation of the 1917 Constitution and the emergence of the countrys current political system. Mexico has the fifteenth largest nominal GDP and the eleventh largest by purchasing power parity, the Mexican economy is strongly linked to those of its North American Free Trade Agreement partners, especially the United States. Mexico was the first Latin American member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and it is classified as an upper-middle income country by the World Bank and a newly industrialized country by several analysts. By 2050, Mexico could become the fifth or seventh largest economy. The country is considered both a power and middle power, and is often identified as an emerging global power. Due to its culture and history, Mexico ranks first in the Americas. Mexico is a country, ranking fourth in the world by biodiversity. In 2015 it was the 9th most visited country in the world, Mexico is a member of the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the G8+5, the G20, the Uniting for Consensus and the Pacific Alliance. Mēxihco is the Nahuatl term for the heartland of the Aztec Empire, namely, the Valley of Mexico, and its people, the Mexica and this became the future State of Mexico as a division of New Spain prior to independence. It is generally considered to be a toponym for the valley became the primary ethnonym for the Aztec Triple Alliance as a result. After New Spain won independence from Spain, representatives decided to name the new country after its capital and this was founded in 1524 on top of the ancient Mexica capital of Mexico-Tenochtitlan

3.
Fault (geology)
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In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock, across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movement. Large faults within the Earths crust result from the action of tectonic forces. Energy release associated with movement on active faults is the cause of most earthquakes. A fault plane is the plane that represents the surface of a fault. A fault trace or fault line is the intersection of a plane with the ground surface. A fault trace is also the line commonly plotted on maps to represent a fault. Since faults do not usually consist of a single, clean fracture, the two sides of a non-vertical fault are known as the hanging wall and footwall. By definition, the wall occurs above the fault plane. This terminology comes from mining, when working a tabular ore body, because of friction and the rigidity of rocks, they cannot glide or flow past each other easily, and occasionally all movement stops. A fault in ductile rocks can also release instantaneously when the rate is too great. The energy released by instantaneous strain-release causes earthquakes, a common phenomenon along transform boundaries, slip is defined as the relative movement of geological features present on either side of a fault plane, and is a displacement vector. A faults sense of slip is defined as the motion of the rock on each side of the fault with respect to the other side. In practice, it is only possible to find the slip direction of faults. Based on direction of slip, faults can be categorized as, strike-slip. Dip-slip, offset is predominantly vertical and/or perpendicular to the fault trace, oblique-slip, combining significant strike and dip slip. The fault surface is usually vertical and the footwall moves either left or right or laterally with very little vertical motion. Strike-slip faults with left-lateral motion are known as sinistral faults. Those with right-lateral motion are known as dextral faults

4.
Hydrothermal vent
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A hydrothermal vent is a fissure in a planets surface from which geothermally heated water issues. Hydrothermal vents are found near volcanically active places, areas where tectonic plates are moving apart, ocean basins. Hydrothermal vents exist because the earth is both active and has large amounts of water on its surface and within its crust. Common land types include hot springs, fumaroles and geysers, under the sea, hydrothermal vents may form features called black smokers. Chemosynthetic bacteria and archaea form the base of the chain, supporting diverse organisms, including giant tube worms, clams, limpets. Active hydrothermal vents are believed to exist on Jupiters moon Europa, and Saturns moon Enceladus, Hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean typically form along the mid-ocean ridges, such as the East Pacific Rise and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. These are locations where two plates are diverging and new crust is being formed. The proportion of each varies from location to location, in contrast to the approximately 2 °C ambient water temperature at these depths, water emerges from these vents at temperatures ranging from 60 to as high as 464 °C. Due to the hydrostatic pressure at these depths, water may exist in either its liquid form or as a supercritical fluid at such temperatures. The critical point of water is 375 °C at a pressure of 218 atmospheres, however, introducing salinity into the fluid raises the critical point to higher temperatures and pressures. The critical point of seawater is 407 °C and 298.5 bars, accordingly, if a hydrothermal fluid with a salinity of 3.2 wt. % NaCl vents above 407 °C and 298.5 bars, furthermore, the salinity of vent fluids have been shown to vary widely due to phase separation in the crust. The critical point for lower salinity fluids is at lower temperature and pressure conditions than that for seawater, for example, a vent fluid with a 2.24 wt. % NaCl salinity has the point at 400 °C and 280.5 bars. Thus, water emerging from the hottest parts of some hydrothermal vents can be a supercritical fluid, examples of supercritical venting are found at several sites. Sister Peak vents low salinity phase-separated, vapor-type fluids, sustained venting was not found to be supercritical but a brief injection of 464 °C was well above supercritical conditions. A nearby site, Turtle Pits, was found to vent low salinity fluid at 407 °C, which is above the critical point of the fluid at that salinity. A vent site in the Cayman Trough named Beebe, which is the worlds deepest known hydrothermal site at ~5000 m below sea level, has shown sustained supercritical venting at 401 °C and 2.3 wt% NaCl

5.
Oceanic trench
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The oceanic trenches are linear oceanographic features which are topographic depressions of the sea floor, relatively narrow in width, but hemispheric-scale in length. They are the deepest parts of the ocean floor, a trench marks the position at which the flexed, subducting slab begins to descend beneath another lithospheric slab. Trenches are generally parallel to an island arc, and about 200 km from a volcanic arc. Oceanic trenches typically extend 3 to 4 km below the level of the surrounding oceanic floor, the greatest ocean depth to be sounded is in the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench, at a depth of 11,034 m below sea level. Oceanic lithosphere moves into trenches at a rate of about 3 km2/yr. Globally, there are over 50 major ocean trenches covering an area of 1.9 million km2 or about 0. 5% of the oceans and this applies to Cascadia, Makran, southern Lesser Antilles, and Calabrian trenches. Trenches are related to but distinguished from continental collision zones, where continental crust enters the subduction zone, when buoyant continental crust enters a trench, subduction eventually stops and the convergent plate margin becomes a collision zone. Trenches were not clearly defined until the late 1940s and 1950s, the bathymetry of the ocean was of no real interest until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the initial laying of Transatlantic telegraph cables on the seafloor between the continents. Even then the elongated bathymetric expression of trenches was not recognized until well into the 20th century, the term “trench” does not appear in Murray and Hjort’s classic oceanography book. Instead they applied the term “deep“ for the deepest parts of the ocean, the term was first used in a geologic context by Scofield two years after the war ended to describe a structurally controlled depression in the Rocky Mountains. Johnstone, in his 1923 textbook An Introduction to Oceanography, first used the term in its sense for any marked. His measurements revealed that trenches are sites of downwelling in the solid Earth, the concept of downwelling at trenches was characterized by Griggs in 1939 as the tectogene hypothesis, for which he developed an analogue model using a pair of rotating drums. World War II in the Pacific led to improvements of bathymetry in especially the western and northern Pacific. The rapid growth of deep sea research efforts, especially the use of echosounders in the 1950s and 1960s confirmed the morphological utility of the term. The important trenches were identified, sampled, and their greatest depths sonically plumbed, the heroic phase of trench exploration culminated in the 1960 descent of the Bathyscaphe Trieste, which set an unbeatable world record by diving to the bottom of the Challenger Deep. This has been termed trench rollback or hinge retreat and this is one explanation for the existence of back-arc basins. Slab rollback is a process which occurs during the subduction of two tectonic plates resulting in the motion of the trench. Forces acting perpendicular to the slab at depth are responsible for the migration of the slab in the mantle and ultimately the movement of the hinge

6.
Gulf of California
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The Gulf of California is a body of water that separates the Baja California Peninsula from the Mexican mainland. It is bordered by the states of Baja California, Baja California Sur, Sonora, rivers which flow into the Gulf of California include the Colorado, Fuerte, Mayo, Sinaloa, Sonora, and the Yaqui. The gulfs surface area is about 160,000 km2, the Gulf is thought to be one of the most diverse seas on the planet, and is home to more than 5,000 species of micro-invertebrates. Home to over a people, Baja California is one of the longest peninsulas in the world. Parts of the Gulf of California are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the International Hydrographic Organization defines the southern limit of the Gulf of California as, A line joining Piastla Point in Mexico, and the southern extreme of Lower California. The Gulf of California is 1,126 km long and 48–241 km wide, with an area of 177,000 km2, a depth of 818.08 m. Transition zones exist between regions, and they usually vary for each individual species. The temperature of the water in the Gulf of California generally experiences lows of 16 °C in winter, but temperatures can vary greatly in the gulf, and the water is almost always warmer by the coast than the open ocean. For example, the waters surrounding La Paz reach 30 °C in August, while the waters in neighboring city Cabo San Lucas, occasionally, the northern Gulf of California will go through significantly cold winters. The water in the Northern Gulf can sometimes drop below 8 °C, the animals most susceptible to the large decrease in water temperature include macroscopic algae and plankton. As part of process, the East Pacific Rise propagated up the middle of the Gulf along the seabed. This extension of the East Pacific Rise is often referred to as the Gulf of California Rift Zone, the Gulf would extend as far as Indio, California, except for the tremendous delta created by the Colorado River. This delta blocks the sea from flooding the Mexicali and Imperial Valleys, volcanism dominates the East Pacific Rise. The island of Isla Tortuga is one example of ongoing volcanic activity. Furthermore, hydrothermal vents due to extension tectonic regime, related to the opening of the Gulf of California, are found in the Bahía de Concepción, the narrow sea is home to a unique and rich ecosystem. The unusual resident populations of fin whales and sperm whales do not migrate annually, the area near the delta of the Colorado river has a small remnant population of the totoaba fish. This region has historically been a magnet for world-class sport fishing activities, the region also has a rich history as a commercial fishery. However, the data vary wildly according to the species being studied, moreover, changes in terrestrial ecology, such as the vast reduction in flow from the Colorado River into the Gulf, have negatively affected fisheries, particularly in the northern region

7.
Guaymas
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Guaymas is a city located in Guaymas Municipality in the southwest part of the state of Sonora in northwestern Mexico. The city is located 117 km south of the capital of Hermosillo, and 242 miles from the U. S. border. The municipality is located in the Sonora Desert and has a hot, the municipality’s formal name is Guaymas de Zaragoza and the city’s formal name is the Heróica Ciudad de Guaymas. The city proper is mostly an industrial port, with nearby San Carlos being the major tourist attraction for its beaches, the city also has a well-attended annual carnival, which has been held since 1888. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the now known as Guaymas was dominated by the Guaymas, Seri. In 1539, two Spanish ships, the Santa Agueda and El Trinidad, arrived in Guaymas Bay. They were commanded by Francisco de Ulloa, who called the area “the port of ports. ”Some small Jesuit missions in the area were founded in the 1610s and 1620s, the Seri strongly opposed the settlement of Europeans and resisted fiercely until 1769. Juan María de Salvatierra and Eusebio Kino asked for permission to evangelize the area, in 1701, Salvatierra came to this area and established the Loreto mission somewhat inland from where Guaymas is now. To receive supplies by ship and evangelize the Guaymas Indians, the Jesuits founded another small mission on the bay and it was headed by Manuel Diaz. The Seri repeatedly attacked the San José mission, forcing it to be abandoned, the last time this mission was abandoned was in 1759. In 1767, Viceroy Marqués de Croix ordered a military offensive. After doing so, the Spanish colonials built a fort with four towers in Guaymas. No traces of the fort today, but the San José mission is marked by a church located on the road leading to Empalme. Around the same time, the colonists formally mapped the Guaymas Bay, despite the decree, no colonists settled there until the early 19th century. In the late 18th and early 19th century, there was only one inhabitant in Guaymas, called “Tio Pepe”, who was said to be a drunk. At the beginning of the 19th century, the village began to be populated by farmers and ranchers, farming was on a subsistence level. In 1811, commercial traffic was authorized, and customs were established later in 1823. Guaymas received the name San Fernando de Guaymas in 1820, ships visited the bay intermittently but only one house was here for customs purposes

8.
Plate tectonics
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The theoretical model builds on the concept of continental drift developed during the first few decades of the 20th century. The geoscientific community accepted plate-tectonic theory after seafloor spreading was validated in the late 1950s, the lithosphere, which is the rigid outermost shell of a planet, is broken up into tectonic plates. The Earths lithosphere is composed of seven or eight major plates, where the plates meet, their relative motion determines the type of boundary, convergent, divergent, or transform. Earthquakes, volcanic activity, mountain-building, and oceanic trench formation occur along plate boundaries. The relative movement of the plates typically ranges from zero to 100 mm annually, tectonic plates are composed of oceanic lithosphere and thicker continental lithosphere, each topped by its own kind of crust. Along convergent boundaries, subduction carries plates into the mantle, the material lost is balanced by the formation of new crust along divergent margins by seafloor spreading. In this way, the surface of the lithosphere remains the same. This prediction of plate tectonics is also referred to as the conveyor belt principle, earlier theories, since disproven, proposed gradual shrinking or gradual expansion of the globe. Tectonic plates are able to move because the Earths lithosphere has greater strength than the underlying asthenosphere. Lateral density variations in the result in convection. Plate movement is thought to be driven by a combination of the motion of the seafloor away from the ridge and drag, with downward suction. Another explanation lies in the different forces generated by forces of the Sun. The relative importance of each of these factors and their relationship to other is unclear. The outer layers of the Earth are divided into the lithosphere and asthenosphere and this is based on differences in mechanical properties and in the method for the transfer of heat. Mechanically, the lithosphere is cooler and more rigid, while the asthenosphere is hotter, in terms of heat transfer, the lithosphere loses heat by conduction, whereas the asthenosphere also transfers heat by convection and has a nearly adiabatic temperature gradient. The key principle of plate tectonics is that the lithosphere exists as separate and distinct tectonic plates, Plate motions range up to a typical 10–40 mm/year, to about 160 mm/year. The driving mechanism behind this movement is described below, tectonic lithosphere plates consist of lithospheric mantle overlain by either or both of two types of crustal material, oceanic crust and continental crust. Average oceanic lithosphere is typically 100 km thick, its thickness is a function of its age, as passes, it conductively cools

9.
East Pacific Rise
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The East Pacific Rise is a mid-oceanic ridge, a divergent tectonic plate boundary located along the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It separates the Pacific Plate to the west from the North American Plate, the Rivera Plate, the Cocos Plate, the Nazca Plate, and the Antarctic Plate. Much of the lies about 3200 km off the South American coast and rises about 1. The oceanic crust is moving away from the East Pacific Rise to either side, near Easter Island the rate is over 15 cm per year which is the fastest in the world but it is lower at about 6 cm at the north end. On the eastern side of the rise the eastward moving Cocos and Nazca plates meet the westward moving South American Plate, the belt of volcanoes along the Andes and the arc of volcanoes through Central America and Mexico are the direct results of this collision. Due east of the Baja California Peninsula, the Rise is sometimes referred to as the Gulf of California Rift Zone, in this area, newly formed oceanic crust is intermingled with rifted continental crust originating from the North American Plate. The southern extension of the East Pacific Rise merges with the Southeast Indian Ridge at the Macquarie Triple Junction south of New Zealand, along the East Pacific Rise the hydrothermal vents called black smokers were first discovered and have been extensively studied. These vents are forming volcanogenic massive sulfide ore deposits on the ocean floor, many strange deep-water creatures have been found here. The southern stretch of the East Pacific Rise is one of the sections of the Earths mid-ocean ridge system. East Pacific Rise 2004 – Scripps Institution of Oceanography Columbia University Researchers Find Key to the Formation of New Seafloor Spreading Centers – Columbia University

10.
Transform fault
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A transform fault or transform boundary, is a type of fault whose relative motion is predominantly horizontal, in either a sinistral or dextral direction. Furthermore, transform faults end abruptly and are connected on both ends to other faults, ridges, or subduction zones, Transform faults are the only type of strike-slip fault that can be classified as a plate boundary. The new class of faults, called transform faults, produce slip in the direction from what one would surmise from the standard interpretation of an offset geological feature. Slip along transform faults does not increase the distance between the ridges it separates, the distance remains constant in earthquakes because the ridges are spreading centers. This hypothesis was confirmed in a study of the fault plane solutions that showed the slip on transform faults points in the opposite direction than classical interpretation would suggest, Transform faults are closely related to transcurrent faults, and are commonly confused. In addition, transform faults have equal deformation across the fault line, while transcurrent faults have greater displacement in the middle of the fault zone. Finally, transform faults can form a plate boundary, while transcurrent faults cannot. The effect of a fault is to strain, which can be caused by compression, extension. Transform faults specifically relieve strain by transporting the strain between ridges or subduction zones, Transform faults also act as the plane of weakness allowing for the splitting in rift zones. Transform faults are commonly found linking segments of mid-oceanic ridges or spreading centres and these mid-oceanic ridges are where new seafloor is constantly created through the upwelling of new basaltic magma. With new seafloor being pushed and pulled out, the older seafloor slowly slides away from the mid-oceanic ridges toward the continents, although separated only by tens of kilometers, this separation between segments of the ridges causes portions of the seafloor to push past each other in opposing directions. This lateral movement of seafloors past each other is where transform faults are currently active, Transform faults move differently than a strike-slip fault at the mid-oceanic ridge. Evidence of this can be found in paleomagnetic striping on the seafloor, a paper written by Gerya theorizes that the creation of the transform faults between the ridges of the mid-oceanic ridge is attributed to rotated and stretched sections of the mid-oceanic ridge. This occurs over a period of time with the spreading center or ridge slowly deforming from a straight line to a curved line. Finally, fracturing along these planes forms transform faults, as this takes place, the fault changes from a normal fault with extensional stress to a strike slip fault with lateral stress. In the study done by Bonatti & Crane, peridotite and gabbro rocks were discovered in the edges of the transform ridges and these rocks are created deep inside the Earth’s mantle and then rapidly exhumed to the surface. This evidence helps to prove that new seafloor is being created at the mid-oceanic ridges, as previously stated, active transform faults are between two tectonic structures or faults. Fracture zones represent the active transform fault lines, which have since passed the active transform zone and are being pushed toward the continents

11.
Middle America Trench
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The Middle America Trench is a major subduction zone, an oceanic trench in the eastern Pacific Ocean off the southwestern coast of Middle America, stretching from central Mexico to Costa Rica. The trench is 1,700 miles long and is 21,880 feet at its deepest point, the trench is the boundary between the Rivera, Cocos, and Nazca plates, and the North American and Caribbean plates. It is currently the 18th deepest trench in the world, many large earthquakes have occurred in the area of the Middle America Trench. The Middle America Trench can be divided into a northern and a southern section, however, the division is not the same in its seaward side and its landward side. On the landward side, the division is demarcated along the Polochic-Motagua fault system, the dividing point in the landward side is about 400 km east of that in the seaward side

Normal fault in the Bozeman Group near the Harrison Reservoir, Montana

A fault in Morocco.The fault plane is the steeply leftward-dipping line in the centre of the photo, which is the plane along which the rock layers to the left have slipped downwards, relative to the layers to the right of the fault.

The Peru–Chile Trench is located just left of the sharp line between the blue deep ocean (on the left) and the light blue continental shelf, along the west coast of South America. It runs along an oceanic-continental boundary, where the oceanic Nazca Plate subducts beneath the continental South American Plate

Schematic cross section of a subduction zone with an accretionary prism formed by off-scraping sediments from the down-going plate